Quick take:
- Metaverse startup Improbable has completed a $150M funding round from Andreessen Horowitz, SoftBank and others.
- The UK-based company is building a network of interoperable metaverses called MSquared (M2).
- The platform will allow brands and creators to build their own metaverses and Web3 businesses.
Improbable has completed a $150 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and SoftBank Vision Fund 2. The company is building a network of interoperable metaverses called MSquared (M2). Improbable’s metaverse platform will allow brands and creators to develop their own metaverses and Web3 products within its network.
The creators will be able to organise large-scale metaverse experiences with their communities whilst also offering interoperability between blockchains and Web3 businesses.
The funding round also attracted the participation of Digital Currency Group, CMT Digital, Mirana Ventures, Morgan Creek Capital, Ethereal Ventures, and AllianceDAO, among others.
Improbable is looking to bridge an emerging gap between current metaverse experiences and the industry demand. In a blog post announcing the funding round, the company wrote:
“The experiences available today cannot support the vast numbers of people or rich interactivity necessary to fulfil the metaverse’s promise – or are closed platforms unable to provide the level of sophisticated interoperability and shared governance expected by users and needed to build investable virtual economies.”
The UK-based startup is using its proprietary technology called Morpheus to give people the tools they need to create their own metaverses.
Commenting on the funding round, Chris Dixon, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said, “Giving people the tools to design their own metaverses at the scale that Improbable enables, with web3 interoperability and composability to expand on each other’s creations, will result in some truly groundbreaking virtual experiences.”
Chris Kurdziel and Jon Allen of Mirana Ventures echoed Dixon’s comments saying that giving people the opportunity to create and share their own metaverses will scale the growth of the industry by accelerating a wide variety of emergent user behaviours.
“These include fair player-governed communities, complex player-driven economies & open developer-powered experiences,” they said, adding that Improbable is the first Web3 company to make this possible at scale.
Improbable was founded in 2012 by Herman Narula and Rob Whitehead. Since then, its technology has been adopted by companies in the entertainment, P2E gaming, defence and academic sectors.
“We founded Improbable to make real the promise of incredible online worlds that were more than just games – they were extensions of our lives,” commented Herman Narula.
The MSquared network will blend Improbable’s Morpheus technology with new services designed to support interoperability, commerce in digital assets, and governance in Web3, thus bringing together brands, communities and creators in highly interactive spaces.
The M2 Network is developed to work with both existing metaverse worlds and new Web3 projects.
Improbable previously raised $502 million in a Series B round led by SoftBank in 2017, two years after Andreessen Horowitz led a Series A round that raised $20 million.
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